More apparent evidence last week of Australian government sensitivity to criticism, as immigration officials relieve Wikileaks founder Julian Assange of his passport on arrival at Melbourne airport.
Immigration officials reportedly told Australian newspaper The Age that Assange's passport is classified as 'normal' on the …

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Theres only one part of this which is a worry...

Sorry but there is really only one part of this which is a worry and thats the customs operative who came up and said that the passport has now been or will be shortly cancelled. Im quite certain this is very much against the law, to threaten to cancel or to cancel without notice or reason an Australian citizens passport.

Unless of course, this is really just headline grabbing and what actually happened was the customs operative turned around and said "look you do realise your passport is due to expire in a few months, yeah?"

Everything else is standard procedure, if you enter Aus (or many other countries) with a ratty passport your bound to have the passport taken and checked (I personally get stopped everytime i enter the UK, and i also have been stopped in India (of all places!) for having a ratty passport!). If you have a criminal record you are likely to be asked questions about it. Doesnt matter if it was 5 years ago or 15, nor does it matter what it is. The system flags you up as having a criminal record you can expect to be asked questions.

And Assange saying he feels unsafe in Australia is just stupid, if he doesnt feel safe in Aus i fail to think of a single country he would feel safe in.

Re: Safe country

How about Mexico? At least there you would get a free drink for embarassing the Gringos, even if you are one.

And, of course, you can just buy off the cops and carry a (bigger) gun then the ones you can't buy off.

Its not a matter of feeling "safe" as in not having to defend yourself; its feeling "safe" in the way that the government doesn't allow you to defend yourself except under its (cosntantly changing politically expedient and convenient) rules...

Safety

He probably doesn't feel safe in Australia because of the rampant police corruption. It went on historically and it still goes on now, albeit not at quite the same level.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/09/2813849.htm as a recent example.

Another one being the "unnoticed for 10 minutes whilst it was carried out" murder of Carl Williams in a high security prison with full CCTV coverage. The guy's body was dragged from one room to another without the security personnel watching the CCTV noticing. Yeah, right!

Australia isn't the land of milk and honey it makes itself out to be. There's plenty of political corruption too. The two generally dovetail quite well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Nuttall is an example of political corruption.

The fact that the Government also tried to prosecute him before the AFP stated the obvious that whatever he did wasn't done in Australia probably has a bit to do with it as well.

He probably wasn't referring to fears for his safety in reference to street crime unless he was thinking of going out for a drink on a Saturday night in Surfer's Paradise.

Re: Safety

Actually, acts that are against Australian law committed by Australian citizens while overseas, even if the acts are legal in the other country, are still prosecutable; Australian citizens are bound to comply with Australian law regardless of their location.

For example, if an Australian citizen goes over to the Philippines and has sex with a 12-year-old (which is legal there within certain restrictions*), he will be arrested as a child molester as soon as he returns to Australia, even though he was not in Australia at the time and the act was legal under Philippines law. Conversely, if a Philippines citizen who has had sex with a 12-year-old at home enters Australia, he can't be arrested or tried, since he's obviously not subject to Australian law in his home country.

Similarly, if publishing the blacklist were a criminal offence in Australia (which I don't think it is yet, because the censorship bill has not yet passed), then Julian Assange could certainly be tried for it here even though he published it while overseas, simply because he's an Australian citizen bound by Australian law. If he wasn't, only then would there be nothing the police could do.

Actually

Actually Steve i think you will find its only certain crimes which you can be tried for in Australia for committing overseas - child abuse/pornography, money laundering and organised crime come to mind but i dont think you can be tried in Aus for things like theft or burglary. However, you will more then likely be extradited to said country to face your crime...

'Traditional' pornography?

Punishing and suppressing decent

@"On the other hand, given the chaos that appears to be in full flow at the Department for Communication"

Government progress (as they call it) tends for the most part to be stochastic, (due to people with competing interests fighting for their views) but even in that apparent noise, there is an overall signal pushing in a given direction (which is the result of the most powerful people who are able to dominate that particular government getting more (on average) of their own way). So out of the apparent chaos comes an overall theme and that theme is to help supporters and punish opponents even though most of that punishment and suppression is via making peoples lives a bit more difficult.

The Australian government sees the Wikileaks founder as an opponent and they won't stand for that and they have the power to make his life more difficult for him.

I have to say it...

This is probably just Australians being Australians

I'm an Australian citizen, and I spent a couple of years traveling around with a ratty Australian passport after it got wet. Mostly, officials just treated it like any other passport, but occasionally someone asked what happened to it. The only times I was given trouble were when leaving Poland, when an official felt the need to look at it with a magnifying glass in between accusing me of working illegally in Poland because I had visited the country three times in two years, and when I was leaving Australia, when an annoying official did pretty much exactly what was described in this article. He took it away from me and took it somewhere else for a while, and came back and gave me a lecture about how "This is unacceptable at an international level" (No, I don't know what that sentence means either") and (rant rant rant). I don't think he threatened to cancel the passport (although he did tell me to get a new one), but Australian officials being a colossal pain in the arse over things like this is standard procedure.

I certainly don't approve of the fact that Australian officials are unpleasant bureaucratic arseholes, but I also don't think it is likely anything sinister was going on here.

'prof' has always had patchy relations with legal authorities

Is Oz overzealous??

A friend of mine was stopped last wek in Mb on a flight from Saigon, 'cos he was an "illegal" 'cos he had overstayed his previous visit by one day, wasn't stopped on exit and and was never informed. My niece, who is married to an Oz, was only allowed back in with her kids 'on sympathy grounds' 'cos her resident visa was out of date, all though she had never been informed it had to be renewed every five years and it had no date on it...

One gets the impression that in recent times the law in Oz is overzealous in general and in respect of immmigration in particular.

not required

my own experience is that residence visa's have start dates in them. When they are granted the accompanying documentation (and all the forms you have to fill in when applying) state very clearly that they last for 5years, even if they say "permanent residence" on them.

While I'm sure your niece's situation but have been quite traumatic for her and her kids at the time the excuse of "not knowing" as no-one had told her is her own fault - people should take more personal responsibility. The fact that they let her back in on "sympathy grounds" is actually something to be grateful for, I'm sure a lot of countries would have said "no visa, no entry".

Anyway, if she's been there for at least 2 years in that 5, she can apply for citzenship (unless they have changed the rules again).

They didn't block the dentist

Well, firstly, they didn't block anybody. It was a list. Nobody knows WHAT it was a list of, it was a list. Clearly of "bad" material but how it was produced, for what purpose and based on what criteria, nobody knows.

BUT the bit that annoys me about the continued quoting of the dentist thing is that the dentist's website was not listed. A single URL deep in his site was listed. And it was listed because it had child porn on it. He didn't put it there. Apparently, it had been hacked by some Russian porn ring. And that, deep link, where the child porn was, was on the list.

I don't support the filter. But I hate the way falsehoods are used to form the argument. There are so many better things to shout about in the space than misquotes about dentists.